The Warlock Wandering (23 page)

Chomoi stared. Then she straightened, and her mouth firmed with resolution.

"Well! Always glad to have admirers around." Whitey turned to pump Rod's hand. "What do you think of my show?"

"Uh..." Rod cast a look of appeal to Gwen. "You wrote the script for this epic?"

"Yeah, me." Whitey frowned. "What is it? What don't you like?"

Rod took a deep breath and plunged. "Little on the wordy side, isn't it?"

"Hm." Whitey gazed at him, scowling.

Then he turned to Mirane. "Call Gawain over here, will you? And Clyde and Herman." He gazed off into space, abstracted.

Rod turned to Dave with a word of apology on his lips, but Dave held up a palm. "Shh! He's working." The actors came up, and Whitey said, "Herman, take it from, 'You are not now in your native Germany,' will you?" Herman frowned. " 'You are not now in your native Germany, so far to the north and west! Nor are you in...'"

"All right, cut!" Whitey chopped down with his hand.

"Condense it, Herman. How would your character say it?" Herman stared at him for a moment, then smiled and said, "'Surely you do not believe that puny science can prevail against me, young man!'"

Mirane stared up at him, her linger keying the dictation mode on her keypad.

'"You are in my Transylvania now, not in your native Germany, where logic prevails!'" Herman went on. '"No, you are caught between Faith and Reason to the west, and

witchcraft and superstition to the east...'"

"That's enough." Whitey chopped crosswise with his hand. "I get the point; I tried to work in too much geography at one blow. Okay, let's try it this way: Uh... 'You are trapped here, young man—trapped in Transylvania, trapped between the logic of Germany, to the west, and the superstition of Russia, to the east.'"

"Dracula would keep the 'my Transylvania,'" Herman said softly.

Whitey nodded. "Right. Yeah, he would." He flashed a glare at Rod. "Always listen to the actors, because they know the characters better than the writer does."

"But the writer created those characters!" Chomoi objected.

"But the actor re-creates the character his own way," Whitey corrected her. "If I get an actor to portray my character, it ceases to be just mine anymore. It becomes that actor's character, even more than mine, or the actor will do a lousy job." He turned back to Herman with a grin. "But

/ get the final say."

"Only because you hired the producer," Clyde snorted.

"It's immoral, young man—the Executive Producer doing his own directing."

"It's my money, and I'll spend it as I like, old-timer. Now—'You are trapped in Transylvania, my Transylvania, the land of superstition... no... the land of Superstition and Sorcery... no. Superstition and Black Magic... where Science can have no sway!'"

They went on, overhauling the section of dialogue. When they were done, Mirane reminded, "We were going to shoot the scene with the peasants."

"Of course!" Whitey struck his forehead with the heel of his hand. "How much time have we wasted?"

"Not a second," Dave assured him. "We'll make it all back, because it'll be a better epic. But we should shoot all the day's scenes, Whitey."

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"Right! Back to your places!" Whitey spun to the camera ops. "George, you go over by the south wall. Harve, over here, next to me!"

"That's one disadvantage of the writer doing his own directing," Dave confided to Rod. "A separate director could have been shooting a different scene, while he was overhauling this one."

"But how can he?" Chomoi cried. "How can he allow his deathless prose to be violated this way?" Whitey heard her, and turned back, raising a hand. "Guilty. I hereby confess to writing deathless prose, on occasion—

and even immortal verse, now and then. But when I do, 1

do it alone, with only a split of vin ordinaire for company, and I do it for me, myself, only. It's pure self-indulgence, of course—'art for art's sake' really means 'art for the artist's sake.' It's the sheer personal gratification of doing something as well as I can possibly do it, of expressing my feelings, my view of existence, my self—and it's for me, alone. Oh, I don't mind if other people read it, and it's nice if they like it. Sure, I enjoy praise; I'm human, too. But that's just a by-product, a side issue." He looked around at the crowd of actors and technicians. "This—this is another matter. It's another thing entirely. This script, I wrote for other people, and I make it with a host of other people. If no one else ever hears it or sees it, it will have failed. Worse, it'll be absurd, without purpose. Without an audience, it's incomplete."

He turned back to Herman and Gawain. "Okay, Mirane'll tidy that up and get hard copies for you. But let's tape it with the script the way it is first, just in case." The vampire and the hero nodded happily and went back to their places. The little sorcerer followed, grumbling contentedly.

"Places!" Mirane spoke into a ring on her index finger, and her voice boomed out of a loudspeaker. "Quiet on the set."

"Mist," Whitey said quietly.

Fog seemed to grow out of the ground, rising up to obscure Herman and Clyde.

"Lights," Whitey commanded.

High in the air, light suddenly glared from six spots. The two camera operators sauntered out to the side and turned toward the actors. Everyone was silent for a moment, then Harve said, "Balanced."

"Ditto," George called.

Whitey nodded. "Roll."

"Rolling," the camera ops responded.

"Confirm," said a man at a console behind Whitey.

"Action," Whitey called.

The set was quiet a moment longer. Then Gawain came out of the hotel, looked around him with a bemused smile, and inhaled deeply.

"It is pleasant, is it not?" said a sepulchral voice with a heavy accent. "The air of my Transylvania." The mist thinned, gradually revealing the tall, cloaked figure and the stooped, gnarled silhouette behind him.

"The approach of dawn clears the air," Gawain agreed, and the scene went on.

Whitey stood by, approving, at peace.

Finally, Clyde stepped forward, hurling the silk kerchief. Hilda watched, alert, pushing sliders and twisting a knob, and the kerchief fluttered straight at Gawain, settling over the crucifix. Herman grinned, showing his fangs, but this time everyone froze. Silence enveloped the set again. Then Whitey sighed, and called, "Cut." Everyone relaxed, and Herman came striding out of the mist, grinning and chatting with Clyde. Gawain grinned and turned away to have a word with a young lady. Noise swelled up, as everyone started chattering, released from the thralldom of silence. Whitey turned to Rod with a raised eyebrow. "Little better that time?"

"Uh... yeah!" Rod stared, astounded. "It, uh... it helps to do it for real, huh?"

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"Yeah, it does." Whitey turned and looked around. "But the new dialogue will make it work better." He turned back to Rod with a smile. "It only seems natural if you don't break the spell, you see."

Rod gazed at him for a moment, then said, "No, I don't think I do. You mean the old dialogue might make the audience realize they were just watching a show?"

"It might," Whitey said. "If it stood out for you, it might distract them. Then we might as well have never come to this place. Our work here would have been wasted." He smiled suddenly. "But I don't think the new version will distract anybody. No. It'll hold their attention." Rod frowned. "Why do you care about that so much?

Isn't it enough just to know you did the job right?" Whitey shook his head. "If the audience is bored, they'll spread the word, and nobody'll buy the cube to view, and if nobody buys a copy, we won't make money. If we don't make money, we can't make any more epics."

"But that's not the main reason."

"No, of course not." Whitey grinned. "Let's get down to basics—if nobody watches it, there was no point in making it."

"What point?" Rod demanded. "You've been the top poet of your time! Your place in history is guaranteed, and so is your bankroll, if you can afford to make an epic like this!

Why should you sully your reputation by making 3DT epics?"

"Because people need to learn things," Whitey said, "or they'll let themselves fall prey to slavemasters—the way the Terrans actually voted in the PEST regime. And that hurts me, because I want everybody to be free to read what I write. I don't want to take a chance that some censor might lock up my manuscript and not let anyone read it. So I'm going to teach them what they need to know, to insist on staying free."

"With a horror story? A Dracula spectacula?" Rod exclaimed.

"You've got it," Whitey affirmed. "Even this, just a

cheap work of entertainment, can do it. What'll they learn?

Oh, just a few random bits about Terran geography. After all, most people don't know where Transylvania was, or how the Dracula legend came to be, so we give them just a few facts about that. And along with it, just a touch of the history of Terra's Europe—and the peasants' struggle out of the chains of feudalism. Just a few facts, mind you; just a dozen, in a whole two hours. But if they watch two hours and twelve facts every day of their lives, they can learn enough to yell 'No!' when the next man on horseback comes riding in."

"You're a teacher!" Rod exploded. "On the sly! This is covert action! Subversive education!"

"I'll plead guilty again." Whitey grinned. "But I can't claim all the credit. Most of these techniques, I picked up from a cheery old reprobate on a frontier planet."

"Cholly!"

"Oh, you've met him?" Whitey grinned again. "Charles T. Barman, officially."

"I, uh, did hear something of the, uh, sort..."

"The rogue educator," Whitey said, "the only professor living who doesn't worry about tenure. Business, maybe, but not tenure. Strog and I spent a year with him out on Wolmar. Quite a chap, that. Couldn't believe how much he taught me—and at my age!" He grinned. "Not that I didn't throw him a curve or two. Dave and I thought up some techniques between us that he'd never dreamed of." But his words had suddenly moved away from Rod,

become remote. He was remembering that Whitey the Wino had been the creative force behind the DDT's masseducation movement. It had culminated in the coup d'etat that eliminated PEST, and brought in the Decentralized Democratic Tribunal of his own times. But the history books hadn't exactly stressed the fact that Whitey the Wino was the same person as the revered, austere poet, Tod Tambourin. He'd been quiet too long; Whitey's attention had strayed. 784 Christopher Stasheff

He turned away to call the extras, bustling around to set them up in a rough semicircle, facing toward the cameras. A portly man in a tan coverall moved among them, passing out flails and pitchforks.

"And you two lounge out here in the middle for your dialogue." Whitey waved, shooing two actors into place.

"Come on, now, hit your marks! You know, ninety degrees to each other! Upstage man sets up the over-the-shoulder!

Okay, let's run through the lines."

"I don't know... maybe we shouldn't try it," the innkeeper said through his walrus mustache.

"We got to try it," the old farmer answered, testing one of his pitchfork points with a finger. "Ow! Ya, that's sharp enough."

"To do what?" the innkeeper was irritated. "To poke him in his zitsfleisch? What good is that going to do with a vampire, hanh?"

"You talk like an old woman," the farmer snorted. "The pitchfork is just to hold him off while we get a rope around him."

"He'll just go to bat," the innkeeper warned. The farmer shrugged. "So? We'll have Lugorf standing by with his butterfly net. Sooner or later, we slam the stake through his heart."

"And then what?" The innkeeper spread his hands. "So he lies there in his coffin for twenty, thirty years. Sooner or later, some young idiot who's looking for a reputation will go down there and pull out the stake, and where will we be? Right where we are now."

"We've done it before," the fanner maintained, "and we'll do it again."

"Again, and again, and again," the innkeeper moaned.

"How many times do we have to go through it?"

"How many times did our ancestors have to?" the farmer growled. "Five hundred years they've been cleaning up his messes!"

"Five hundred years?" The innkeeper frowned. "That was the first of them—back when 'Dracula' was a title, not a name."

"That's right. It meant 'dragon,' didn't it? Shame on them, giving dragons a bad name like that!"

"At least dragons didn't hurt people for the fun of it," the innkeeper agreed. "At least, that's what they say about the first one."

"His name was 'Vlad.' They called him 'the Impaler."'

The innkeeper nodded. "I remember. This mountain country was just a bunch of tiny kingdoms then, wasn't it?"

"Ya. No kingdom bigger than a hundred miles each way, but their rulers called themselves kings." The farmer shook his head. "What a life for our poor ancestors! Trying to scratch a living out of scraps of level ground, whenever they weren't busy dodging whichever petty king had a war going at the moment!"

"Always fighting," the innkeeper grumbled, "always a battle. It wasn't any better the first time they woke him, a hundred years later..."

Rod listened, amazed, as the two men gossiped through a three-minute history of the Balkans, as seen through the eyes of a couple of Transylvanian peasants. It was ridiculous, it was asinine—and it was working.

"So stick a stake in his sternum... and, at least, we get twenty years of peace," the farmer reminded the innkeeper.

"Maybe that doesn't mean much to you, but my cattle start looking pale when there aren't enough gullible people around."

"Where do you think the gullible people stay away from?" the innkeeper retorted. "My inn! Maybe you've got a point. No matter how you bite it, the Count's bad for business."

"So we nail him down again," the farmer sighed, hefting his pitchfork, "and twenty years from now, our sons take their turn. So? You do what you have to do to make a living, right?"